Briefly Noted

Mr G, by Alan Lightman (Knopf). A note at the end of this concise but ambitious novel about God’s, or Mr g’s, creation of life, the universe, and everything else assures the reader that its narrative adheres to “the best current data and theories in physics, astronomy, and biology.” Lightman, a theoretical physicist as well as a novelist, has an atypically data-driven approach to fiction; we learn early on that the invention of music involved “a scale with a fixed ratio of frequencies, generally 2 1/12, since exponential powers of that number came closest to ratios of small integers like 3:2 and 4:3.” This makes for an unusual but often charming account of work in the Void, with interference from Mr g’s squabbling relatives Aunt Penelope and Uncle Deva, and the suggestions of the slick, demonic Belhor, who advocates for free will. “Rationality and logic can be spiritual,” Mr g tells us, gently making Lightman’s point that religion and science are perfectly compatible.

Hope: a Tragedy, by Shalom Auslander (Riverhead). What’s the point of living if life ends in pain and fear? This cheerful thought preoccupies Solomon Kugel, a young family man who has recently moved his wife and toddler to a farmhouse in upstate New York. The meticulously absurd tale begins when Kugel climbs up to his attic and discovers a surly geriatric squatter who claims to be Anne Frank. Unwilling to become “the person—the Jewish person—that reported Anne Frank to the authorities,” Kugel allows his ornery tenant to remain and finish writing a book meant to eclipse her girlhood diary. But her “annoying writer bullshit” quickly upsets the delicate balance in the house, and Kugel falters along his narrow path between hope and despair. Auslander paints Kugel’s defeatism with equal parts acid and warmth, but ultimately the conceit is too thin to carry the book.

The Lives of Margaret Fuller, by John Matteson (Norton). This psychologically rich biography traces the brief, quixotic life of the leading female figure of the transcendentalist movement. A child prodigy, Fuller was reared by a father who focussed on cultivating her intellect to the detriment of, as he later ruefully admitted, her “female propriety.” Arrogant and forceful, Fuller had many professional successes: she translated Goethe, edited the transcendentalist journal The Dial, and was the first female writer hired by the New-York Tribune. But she could also repel even her most ardent admirers (she “carried too many guns,” Emerson wrote), and she remained something of an outsider throughout her life. Matteson shrewdly demonstrates how this exclusion may have helped Fuller by pushing her into more adventurous areas of thought and, eventually, leading her to write her groundbreaking manifesto, “Woman in the Nineteenth Century.” Killed in a shipwreck a few years after its publication, Fuller passed into history as a tragic figure. Matteson’s book restores the heroism of her life and work.

Something Urgent I Have To Say To You, by Herbert Leibowitz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). “Literary criticism is an indispensable stethoscope in the biographer’s bag,” Leibowitz writes, in this sweeping biography of William Carlos Williams, a titan of modernist poetry who also treated patients as a family physician in northern New Jersey. Leibowitz combs the poems for clues to Williams’s attitudes and desires, most notably toward women and toward writing. He interprets many poems as commentaries on Williams’s troubled marriage, enhancing the poems’ inherent drama but occasionally underestimating the poet’s ability to create imaginary personae. The author’s command of Williams’s sprawling body of work—including the underappreciated short stories, essays, and plays—and his generous and illuminating use of quotation make Williams’s restless and protean talent clear.

Under the southern portion of the city exists its negative image: a network of more than two hundred miles of galleries, rooms, and chambers.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.